At this point in your semester, you are no doubt well in to
your lead teaching. It’s therefore time to start turning your thoughts toward
your MSU coursework.
No doubt, at times, your coursework feels like a hoop you
need to jump through in order to finish the program. While that feeling is
completely understandable, I would ask you to not get yourself in that habit of
looking at things.
Your MSU coursework is a great opportunity to teach yourself
how to manage the life of a teacher while still maintaining daily time for
growth and reflection. Doing so is absolutely essential, I am convinced, to
your long-term mental resilience.
Teachers are extremely busy. I don’t need to tell you that.
The demands on our attention are innumerable. It is all the more important,
therefore, to make time. The key to realize is that by giving, you receive; by
giving time to yourself, you actually create more of it for others. These are
the laws of mental efficiency.
I’ve heard it said of Gandhi, that when told he would have a
particularly busy day, he committed himself to doubling
the amount of time he would devote to meditation and reflection. Only in
that way would he ensure that he could be fully devoted to the work he needed
to do.
This is, therefore, about the discipline of building a
reflective practice.
My advice is that you devote approximately 10 minutes a day
to each of your MSU courses during the next few weeks. But make this 10 minutes essential. Make it
regular. Don’t let anything else crowd it out.
I recommend that you write about what you are noticing about
your case student. Write about what you are seeing, what you are noticing, and
what you are learning. Create character sketches. Doodle. Free write. Explore. While some of your writing will be
exploratory, my guess is that other writing you do will be able to go directly
into your final case study report.
I’ve learned that university students are pretty vocal about
what, in a course, works for them. That can be a mixed blessing. But mostly it’s
good. University professors don’t have the option of allowing the silence of
students to trick them into believing that everything is going just great for
every single student in their class.
I think it was different in high school. Since students were
less accustomed to speaking up, unless I actively sought out their feedback, it
was rarely offered. Unless I really took the time to examine what was happening
to a student in my class, it was easy to assume that everything was mostly
fine.
Reflection on the lives of children and teenagers is one of
the greatest sources of growth we can have as a teachers. I invite you to use
this case study assignment to get yourself in the habit of using it to improve
your practice.
But doing so requires discipline. It requires regularity. It
requires us to set priorities around our own continued growth as teachers.
Have a great rest of the week. Sharpen those pencils—your March
Madness bracket is just around the corner!
Kyle
